Toon Boom Harmon Walkthrough | Toon Boom Tutorial

okay guys well once again welcome to this harmony 21 presentation um toon boom harmony premium is what we're going to look at today there are two other versions of toon boom harmony there's toon boom essentials and toon boom um harmony advanced okay so to harmony essentials and harmony advanced the one that we're going to look at today is premium harmony premium the other two are really for essentials is really really for beginners i would say even young kids or young adults wanting to go into animation for the very first time it's very basic tools and harmony advanced is specialized into traditional frame by frame paperless animation there are very little compositing tools there are very little rigging cutout animation tools um and premium has got all the bells and whistles everything from the basic drawing tools to all the way to the advanced 2d and 3d integration as well as compositing and even in the new version now version 21 uh the um the gaming features which we just released so i invite you and encourage you to go on our website and to check out what the software can do i will not be able to cover everything today it's quite a massive software um and but i will be i will show you as much as i can in the time that we've got so tundum harmony is as andy indicated the industry standard out there in terms of 2d animation not just 2d though we've sort of not coined but we've taken on the term of two and a half d and you'll see why as i do the demonstration you can also bring in 3d assets inside of toon boom harmony so obviously you are not making the assets in harmony you are importing assets that you've made somewhere else and you can then animate both the 2d and the 3d in the same environment so that's very very practical and powerful there you can also go all the way to compositing harmony has got a very very strong compositing feel to it you'll see towards the end of the demonstration what what it can do it is used in most major productions that you can think of that are 2d productions whether it's for television series most of for example the the new disney channel produced for sorry disney plus produced shows i've done 2d shows are done on harmony most of the new netflix shows are done on harmony most of the apple tv plus shows that are 2d are done on harmony so the peanuts for example the new ones so all of those things as well as movies feature films of course and gaming there's a very exciting um indie games that are done uh with uh toon boom harmony and hopefully aaa games coming soon as well so as you can see it's used around the world it's used by major corporations major studios and work is very much needed we need skills andy will touch on that towards the end we you know the world needs skilled uh animators riggers um you know compositors being able to use harmony and uh and so this is really very interesting for you to go into so um one of the first things that we i generally talk about is the fact that harmony is um is the industry standard for many reasons and one one of those reasons is the fact that it is also a software that is very much um in line with the industry standards right so you can work in any resolution that you want you can work all the way to 8k if necessary um and change the resolution after the fact so it's it's resolution independent um it can work with in both vector and bitmap i'm assuming that you guys are familiar with these terms uh bitmap being more pixelized types of images and vector being this amazing technology that doesn't seem to to ever pixelize or it never does and also very flexible and light to use so in harmony you can work in both bitmap and vector and you can also set your project so that they are ready for what the industry is requiring so 4k hdr for example such as what netflix or disney plus are requiring you can work natively in harmony in those you might not need those type of things right now that's fine but you you need to know that that is one of the criterias that a lot of the studios are requesting in in the software that we use that they're using okay so um i'm gonna go through uh some of the tools that we have in terms of um designing uh and drawing and then going into the two styles of animation that harmony is able to uh to cover and that is the paperless frame by frame animation and the cutout animation or puppet animation style as well okay so first of all i'm going to talk about the library now the library is for me arguably one of the most essential and powerful tool that we have the library allows you to save anything that you create or that you bring inside of harmony as a template right so throughout demonstration i'm going to be dragging and drop and dropping a few things from to and from the library okay so the library um really anything can be said it can be still images it can be an animatic which we'll see just now it can be a whole animation sequence frame by frame a whole a whole rig a whole scene even 3d images sound sound files and so on so everything that you bring in can be saved as a template this is very interesting to many many types of productions whether it is uh you know long-form productions or student films because you can share your assets with everybody and it's very easy you just save it in the right place and you have it available and you drag and drop it into the scene it's that simple okay so the first one is to show you the different drawing tools that we have so i'm just going to go over this a little bit quicker than usual because there are a lot more very very exciting things for us to cover so i wanted to show you the bitmap capabilities so as i said you can draw and create natively in bitmap inside of toon boom harmony so you can you can see here the image has got a nice texture to it this was drawn directly inside of harmony using our brush tool a brush tool is very versatile you have a whole bunch of already preset textures that you can use you don't have to use textures you can use very um you know very straightforward hardness and solid bitmaps like this you can use any textures that you want to you can create them inside of harmony and save them as presets or bring them also from outside so if you've already got if you already got textures from somewhere else you could then maybe export them and bring them here so all the settings that you've got can also be then saved into presets so if you guys are working in a team or if you have specific presets for your um specific drawings you can just save them and save time uh by by just accessing the presets straight away when i say presets it's not just the texture itself it's also the sizes it's also um the the properties of the pressure or the tilt or anything like that that you may have already set for your pen for that specific pen and then you can also share it right so you can go here and you can import or export the brushes and you can share it amongst your team members if you have if you're working in a team so that can be very useful okay of course the other um the other tools that we have for bitmap are very similar to what you would have with a software such as adobe photoshop for example where you can cut your drawings you can select you can move them around you can draw shading you can do a whole bunch of different things you can paint and so on so all of that is very much there then into onto vector vector technology we have essentially two types of brushes or tools in in vector we have the vector brush which is this one here as you can see the vector brush has got some you know some information on the outside of the brush so if i select the vector line you can change the um the thickness of that line and that's the archetypical uh kind of property for a brush right so you can you know depending on the pressure sensitivity you can make it thinner or thicker um so i'm not i'm probably not at you know teaching you anything about about vector except that in harmony we have what we call a textured vector okay and that means that the line looks pixelated right if i go in it looks pixelated it looks like it's a bitmap line but in fact it is a vector line so we still have the points that um that you can move around that you can create new points you can delete points it acts exactly like a vector line but it is it's got texture so if when you go into your brush properties of your vector brush properties you can actually change from solid vector to textured vector and in that case you have still all the the textures the bitmap textures that you had um previously on the bitmap tool and all the settings that you can set for this particular tool all right so there's a lot there that you can do then we have the pencil line arguably this is the uh most used uh type of line in 2d animation uh in into the harmony that's for many reasons one is that it's very flexible you can paint or draw with it and and and also change some attributes to the lines after they've been drawn so for example the first attribute is the size right so you can change um you can change the the size of the line after the fact so for example here i'm going to make the lines thicker like that or thinner and this is cool because you can also set this to change proportionally to the distance of the camera right so um when you when you go into compositing you can set a compositing node that allows you to make the the lines thicker as you move the camera away from that specific object and as you bring the object closer then the lines will go thinner again i'm sure you guys that have done paperless animation or um sort of digital uh productions in vector uh would would agree that this is something that would be very very useful indeed okay so um and the pencil line is uh also able to add texture to it so this is a textured pencil line so same as the brush as you can see it's got a nice texture to it and even if it has texture you can still change the size after the fact you can still change also the taper of the line after the fact like you could do with the solid line but you can also change the texture itself after the fact so as you've drawn in one texture or with no texture right and then you can apply texture after you've drawn with it so um at any point you can change your lines and the appearance of your lines remaining these lines remaining vector of course all along okay so um the the drawing tools as you can see are very versatile um of course we've got your favorite tools the rectangle ellipse the line tools the polyline tool all of those are actually pencil lines so you can change their appearances you know we know that sometimes the polyline or the line tools can be quite like robotic and very clean but then you can change them you can add texture to them you can change the taper you can change the sizes uh however you you need them to to to be okay so it doesn't stop you from starting to draw and then manipulating your lines as and when you need to of course we've got text of course we've got the eraser of course you can paint i will go into the painting a little bit later as well and uh and so all of those types of of typical tools are there uh without a problem okay so let me now move on from the drawing tools into into some animation so one of the first things that you would do when you bring when you want to create animation in any software is to maybe use a reference right so we you would probably use a storyboard and hopefully you would have the storyboard or the references uh in your scene as you are creating your animation so that you can work on top of it now we have another pre-production software from toon boom it's called storyboard pro it is also the industry standard in terms of storyboarding it's used for anything from animate kits shows to also live access action shows or films as well as gaming's advertising pieces it's really a very phenomenal piece of software i recommend to for you to have a look at it as well and from storyboard 4 you can export directly into harmony where you would have your your board or your animatic uh embedded into the scene as you're starting your animation you already have that in there okay so you can do that or you can also save it as a template and like i'm doing now just drag and drop your board or your animatic onto your scene and now you have uh the board there so i'm just gonna play this in the background while i am rambling on so as you can see you have the um the board uh you could if there was um there was a camera move as you can see there there's a camera move already uh if there were dialogues the dialogues will be in there um so all of that all of that information can be preserved inside of your animatic and then scene into into your harmony scene okay so from here you would now start you know introducing your your your key animations your rough animations i'm gonna first talk about traditional frame by frame animation okay um this is obviously the basis of animation and i'm sure you guys will be will be touching on that and learning how to use it it is still very much used today um and especially digital paperless uh animation like this okay so the first thing that one would do is obviously look at the animatic for timing purposes and posing um and maybe layout as well and you would then start um you know plotting your rough animation for example right so i'm going to just bring the rough animation on into the scene i'm not an animator myself so i would i'm going to spare you from the um excruciating thing of seeing me trying to animate so instead you've got very nicely made animations that were prepared for this demonstration so i'm just going to hide the animatic and play that for you so this animation was done in inside of harmony from scratch on multiple layers as you can see so i can look at the layers directly into the timeline like this and you can see the different exposures of that animation directly on the timer so animating on the timeline into room harmony is very easy you can even bring up the thumbnails if you want to make the timeline a bit a bit bigger so you can see what's going on so you can see the thumbnails of the frame by frame animation you know directly into the timeline and you can manipulate those frames as well the exposures right so you could for example you can see here that this frame here is um exposed and and posed for a while before it it moves again so you could for example make this exposure shorter and it moves everything else if you need to do it this way or you can make it longer or you can delete it altogether or you can add a brand new drawing in the middle of that so let's do that for a second so we're gonna go here and we're gonna just add an empty drawing right there don't worry i'm not gonna animate for you right here but what i'm going to do is i'm going to show you how the um the onion skin works okay so onion skin is a technology that allows you to see your previous and your your next drawings okay set of drawings so that you can start animating just like you would on paper and you have your transparent semi-transparent piece of paper and you see the ones underneath and you would flip you would flip the animation so here you can do that you've got tools that allow you to to to flip directly and you can just jump to the the previous or the next type of animation and you can see it like that right so you can do those types of of flipping things we have what we call a advanced onion skin tab at the moment it is on advanced and the advanced one allows you to see very specific pieces of your of your animation in your onion skin it also allows you to change the transparency of your onion skin like this so you can basically make them less and less opaque as old or or um they are in the past or further away in the future they are as well okay so that's that's very practical because sometimes onion skin can be just too much in your face and when you're trying to concentrate on the drawing that you are currently on so all of that's completely customizable or you stay in the very traditional you know normal onion skinning and so you go into the basic one and it just looks like this and you've got your handles on your timeline which you can increase the amount of drawings that you want to see before and drawings that you want to see after for example okay so this really basic animation tools that any animator would need to use in order to see what they are busy for doing further than the the onion skin of course you can also create you can create your own um you know your exposures you can mark them as key drawings or breakdowns and intermediates you can do that directly into the the timeline or you can also do it in the exposure sheet so the exposure sheet for those of you who are learning animation um or have used it before it is one of the oldest ways to animate and to represent timing so the exposure sheet will obviously expose your drawings a certain amount of ways and times in in x amount of seconds so for example here you have animated in two so you've got frame number four animated twice showing twice and then another frame showing twice and another thing frame showing twice this is animating in twos if you want to change the animation cycle or the speed of the animation you can do so directly inside of the exposure sheet which you could have done also in the timeline very very easy okay so in the exposure sheet over here you could um very much going to set exposure to two or two three or two whichever you've got right there so it's just very finicky there ah you know every time i grab it but you see you see what i mean so you can just change it to animate it in twos and then it will adjust the drawings for you automatically or you can set your own number but also you can you can randomize let's say for example you have raindrops and you have different drawings for raindrops or for snowflakes or for explosions or anything like that you want to randomize it you can do that straight from here or you want to loop it or you want to bounce it or you want to you know so all of that can be done directly into the exposure sheet or onto the timeline all of those tools are also available directly on both so whatever you do on one can be done in the other so the exposure sheet is very nice if for for teachers and for students who are also wanting to use the very traditional ways of animating framework frame or animating full stuff okay right so let's move on now to a the clean version so from the rough you will be doing the clean and the clean is looking uh very nice indeed over here so we're going to actually delete the rough for a bit and i'm going to show you what the clean looks like at the moment so this has been cleaned in harmony you can see the animation is very very cool so from here you would be doing some painting for example now the painting it process is also very very intuitive we have the ability to separate the the line layer from the color layer we even have an overlay and an underlay layer if you want to for every single drawing right so generally what we do is we we suggest that you separate at least your lines from your colors or your colors from your lines um so that you can then affect them in different ways so if you want to put an effect on the colors or on the lines only you can do that and they also that also can be very useful for cut out animation which you'll see a bit later so here i'm on the on the color on the color layer and i can choose any paint tool that i've got i've got paint paint and painted which will paint only areas that are not painted already repaint unpaint and so on we've got a lot of different options of course we've got a very powerful color management system okay so over here we've got uh palettes you can create as many palettes as you want to we do advise that you create a palette per object or per a group of objects that you've got in your scene so your your wizard would have its own palette and maybe you know the table will will have its own and the and the um the beer the beer jug will have its own and so on okay and then you'll be able to create as many colors as you want into those those palettes so most of the time the the design of the character wouldn't be done by yourselves it could be especially in in a learning educational setting where you would be probably doing everything step by step by yourself first but in a production setting you would not be doing the design as well as the animating as well as the composite so when you when you're doing the painting of a um of a character for example come as complex as this one you might not know what these colors are for so you may want to use the model view and from the library you could just be dragging and dropping the model template directly inside the model view and then you don't even need to go into your color palette anymore you just pick the color that you want to use and you start painting on the um on the color layer that you are busy wanting to paint on so and that's it and really it's as simple as that uh you can use tools like this to paint really quickly that's inside of a cape um as you can see there so oops that's not the right one and so yeah and it's very very quick for you to go on and paint like this as you can see okay now of course now you're painting on a um one single drawing but this animation has got multiple drawings and so it could really take you quite a while to have to paint multiple drawings well that's the bane of any incan paint artist in in 2d animation especially if they're using frame by frame animation if they're using cut out of course it's a little bit easier so how do we alleviate this little bottleneck here well in harmony you can paint multiple frames at the same time so you could go into your paint tool properties you could be using the apply to all frames setting and you may want to put on your onion skin so that you can see all your previous drawings or as many as you want and all your next drawings as well or as many as you want right so in this case we've got quite a few here actually let me go into the the drawing view and that will allow me to see a little bit more hopefully let me just make sure that the onion skin here is uh maybe on and allows me to see all of the drawings that i want uh maybe not let me just go back to this one and go to the camera view that's fine okay so here i've got a whole bunch of drawings that i can see for my drawing there and i would like to paint maybe all of them at the same time so i've got that on and all i'm going to do is i'm going to trace let me make sure i have the right color of course so i need to go into the model view and pick the the color of his vest and then just draw a line through like this where my vest is gonna be and you'll see that it's actually going to paint multiple drawings at the same time like that and if i hide the um if i hide the onion skin you can see it's painted in that area that i have traced like that for multiple drawings and that is really really super fast to be able to do that okay so let's maybe do another one maybe for is his face right so maybe we can just cheat it a bit there let's pick up the color of his skin and maybe um go maybe not too far up and do that for the face and as you can see it's painted multiple drawings at once okay so and and that will of course allow you to go so much faster than having to do it frame by frame uh you know drawing by drawing okay now but what happens now if you have something that is painted and that needs to be repainted or the paint and the color is wrong right so it's very often that the art director would ask you to maybe correct something another that that's that can be a problem especially if you've you've animated let's say thousands of frames or hundreds of frames and now you have to actually redo that and um so that could really be quite a a big thing now with toon boom harmony as i mentioned earlier the palette system is very powerful so what you could do is you could actually change any one of the colors that you may want to change um even while um you know you are working on the project so for example if i wanted to change the skin from a light blue and let me just loop this from a light blue to maybe a different color altogether or a darker blue i could change it and as you can see on every single frame i've used this paint it is changing the paint in real time and that could change it on every single frame in your scene or even on multiple scenes so if you've used if someone else is animating another scene of the same character with using the same palette you can change the the color any color and then the next time the animator is going to be reopening the scene it all the colors would have changed so that's really really really practical no need to unpaint no need to repaint or anything like that of course you can add in some gradients if you want to so that it will never definitely not stop you and the gradients will work as well on these paints as well as textures you know if you had textures that would also work now in terms of changing the entire palette uh all at once that's also absolutely uh very easy and possible because in 2d animation there's no like very specific lighting type of thing you can do it but you have to do it in compositing whereas here you can do it straight away and control that yourselves so you could for example clone an entire palette and call this a dark palette okay that's because maybe the character sometimes is in a dark place maybe they are physically in a dark place not emotionally um they could be for example in a dark cavern or you know at night on the outside so what we're going to do is we're actually going to use this palette and tint all of the colors that we want to tint so we're going to except for the line for example so i'm going to use select multiple colors blend all of them show you a preview to show you what it looks like and then you know maybe add a bit of of not red but a bit of blue and darken it like that and we're not going to go too crazy um maybe just a bit like this here and that's it let's see let's say this is the dark type of palette that you want and that's all you need to do apply it and every time you use the character in its dark setting you use this one every time you use it in the day setting you use this one and you can switch between the two without the need of compositing we're not without the need of unpainting and repainting so this color management system is can be very very powerful i haven't even spoken to you about the compositing ramifications of that when you use the compositing nodes as well so um that's that's one of the uh most amazing things i find with um with the painting and color management system all right so let's now move on to paperless uh animation okay um sorry let's move on to cutout animation that paperless is what we've been doing all along um let's move out to to cutout animation before we do that i'm going to talk a little bit about layout and um and backgrounds because we haven't even spoken about that yet of course you can create your background straight into harmony and we've got tools that will allow you to for example play around with your perspectives and help you with your perspectives so that you don't have to fail your perspective class but you can also then use backgrounds or layouts that you've yet that you've created somewhere else you're not stuck to create it into harmony so for example in your import over here you can go into your import images and harmony will understand pretty much any type of files including adobe photoshop files psd files with all of the layers that you've created inside of um inside of photoshop with the blending modes as well that you have added to those layers so you can do that what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring one from the library because i've already done something and prepped this background here so this background as you can see looks pretty flat from the uh offset and um it's got you know multiple layers i can select the layers let me just go into the right tool here and you can see all of these layers are all separated as they were in the original photoshop file however what what i've done here is i've actually pushed some of these into the back onto the z plane because in harmony we actually have a full 3d environment okay so the 3d environment will allow you to push flat to the object like this away from the camera or away from onto the z-depth and then you can convert these to 3d i'm not saying that they all of a sudden magically going to become 3d objects but you can if you want to you can manipulate them in 3d and flip them onto all three axes at the same time they will still look 2d but they can be flipped and moved around on onto all three axes at the same time including the camera so yes in harmony we have a real camera so you can go here and create a camera for example i'm going to add a peg to it to be able to animate it and then i'm going to go and place it a bit so let's do a quick animation of the camera to show you what this looks like okay so first of all i'm going to zoom out and show a little bit more out of the scene like this so we're going to zoom out quite as far as we can go without making it look a bit weird that's it so let's say that's my first post um and then maybe from frame 20 on frame 20 we're gonna we're gonna zoom in like that and go up a little bit over here and that should be enough maybe a little bit more and that's it so that's easy very easy to create a motion here on my timeline you can see the motion of the camera and now if i uh if i've got that selected so i'm just going to select outside here and i'm going to hide everything that is around my camera so i can only see what's inside and as you can see it is really moving very realistically because of the parallax effect that the layers have been placed at different z-depth ha is giving so it looks like the the the back heels are rolling uh forward a little bit because they are at different distances from the camera as the foreground for example so again all of this is realistic it seems like it's nothing but it is actually and believe me all of these things are very relevant and sometimes very painful to try and do them manually whereas now you can do them uh pretty much um you know intuitively with uh okay so from here i'm gonna bring in a rigged character so we are going to bring in the punk and the punk you'll see is a very cool character that has a multitude of elements and in so the basis of um frame by frame anime geez i'm stuck on frame my friend the basis of um cutout animation is that uh you take a 2d character flat character and you break it down in two pieces you have for example the hand which is separated from the arm right you've got the forearm you've got the upper arm and depending on what the character is going to do and how it's supposed to move you are going to break it down and then create a rig and create a hierarchy okay so the hierarchy working works in this way the hand would be the child of the forearm and then because when the forearm moves the its dependency the um you know the the hand will move with it okay so let's just select um sorry i'm just showing you can't you use the escape button because of a zoom so i'm a bit okay there we go so let's now move the forearm and it's taking the hand with it because that's the child of this one and then as we go up the hierarchy it's also going to take the hand oh my goodness the hand and the um and the forearm width so sorry i have oops here we go and now it's selecting that and so now when i move my um my shoulder it's actually moving all of it together so that's the basis very simple basis of the hierarchy for cutouts characters what's good about this technique is that you don't need to redraw many frames so if you want to draw if you want to show the arm bending to pick up something you are going to only you're going to be able to bend it using the the sort of puppet type of of way of of animating okay so of course that creates issues for example for joints and here is a possible issue there which can be alleviated thanks to the uh harmony tools that we have to be able to create cutters and things like that so that it's perfectly fine for the lines to cut in a certain way so when it's like this it's it's together and it stops you know it doesn't it doesn't extend there for example whereas when it's over this it is extended and it stays there so all these little things are set in place because of the rig and the animator can just go and animate um freely without the need of worrying about that so that's the basis of you know cutouts animation also what we can do is the um is to change the drawings as you go along right so in cutout animation you re you very seldomly animate or rig in in 2d anyway you would very seldomly rig the hands for example and all the fingers right because that'll be silly um instead you would just redraw the hand so but in harmony you can access all your drawings very easily using the drawing substitution window which is this one and so you can visually see which hand is which and you can just go directly to the hand that you want to use and and then it will expose that hand at a very specific time in your scene so if this is the hand that you want you just select that one and it will expose that over however however many frames that you wanted to expose to of course any hand is still attached to the arm so if even if you change the hand to another position or another drawing it will always be attached to the uh to the hierarchy and work in in the same way as the others okay so that means that any animator at any point in time can still create all of these different hand positions for example and it will be attached to the rig for any other animator who wants to use it afterwards for example okay so those are some of the techniques and the things that make this uh really really easy and powerful but we can make it even easier than that so for example instead of using traditional cut out techniques such as the one i've showed you now you can also use what we call deformers now deformers are things that allow you to deform a drawing or multiple drawings at the same time so here for example you have a um a deformation called a curve deformation onto the arm and it will actually allow you to deform it like this along the curve and what's really cool about this is that you can manipulate the you know the joints right there you can move them around along that curve if you want to and it's a lot more organic so that really depends on how your um character looks and how you want it to look if you want it to look very bendy like this this could be very practical to have and to use this type of deformer the cool thing really cool thing about the formers is that you can actually take the drawings stretch them and squash them and without having to go inside the drawing itself and extend the line or paint some more all of that can be done directly with the deformers and that also has many other ramifications that i will talk about in an instant okay so that's the um that's the curve deformer we also have another type of deformer we've got quite a few but i'm going to show you a couple uh we've got one called the bone deformer now the bone deformer allows you to move it around a pivot point and bones as the name indicates so we have two bones here and a pivot point in the middle and this allows you to move like this okay so that's the pivot here i can change the size of the pivot like that and i can move the bone you can add more than two bones i've only got two there but you can add a third one and a fourth one and a fifth one indefinite if you want you can create chain if you want to as well now that pivot point is there and it turns around that specific pivot and again you can stretch and squatch squash as much as you want that does not mean by the way that you can't still access the hierarchy in the same way as you would have done without the deformer it's still there you can still move it around you can still rotate it around the shoulder and then again access the deformer at any time so that's totally flexible there and also you can change obviously the hands and change it into another hand position if you want to all of that is still very much relevant okay so that's those are two types of deformers that we have and we can use um namely the um the curve and the bone deformer okay now um there's also others such as the envelope deformer that allows you to also deform with texture so for example here there is a um a freeform deformer which is used specifically for textures um and so if you have let's say bitmap images that you bought from photoshop that you want to put a deformer on you can very easily deform it and it will also deform the texture very nicely as well as the lines of course your lines can also be textures textured themselves and you could deform that very easily as well okay so those are some of uh very very cool techniques now let me go on and show you um another thing that is also very popular with cutout animation is the lip syncing okay this is something that i think you'll find pretty pretty exciting um in toon boom harmony you can do automated lip sync okay so i'm gonna bring in a a rig here which is only half of the punk because we only really need his upper half okay so he's quite big into the camera there in fact let me just hide the um the camera move so it doesn't um impede and then i'm going to bring in a sound file okay so any sound file will work wave or um mp3 will work i've also saved it as a template so i just need to drag and drop it in there you don't have to do it this way you can go into file import sound and bring it from there okay so here we have the punk right there we can even again hide what we don't need to see of the camera and for now there is no synchronization okay i'm just going to play the sound um you'll see that his mouth is going to move a bit but then it's not going to move anymore it's just cycling through the drawings that we have of the mouth okay so it's just gonna play wow this is um wow this is okay so i'm just gonna extend the play for a little bit longer here so i'm just gonna go here and go stop okay so we can hear a bit more of that sound wow this is amazing wow this is totally rad okay so let's stop there and we stop the playback uh there so we can loop it from there okay so as you can see the mouth is not animated however his torso is animated his eyes are animated his eyes are shimmering a bit as well so you can see that there is a whole bunch of animation as well and that is again um a way for to show you that you can work in teams very very effectively you can have somebody working on the general animation and then someone else working on the everything that is lip-syncing for example okay so how do you lip-sync well first of all you have to create the drawings for the mouth okay uh you it obviously doesn't create the drawings for you automatically you have to create and but in harmony you don't have to do that many all you need to do is about seven or eight mouth drawings okay you do a closed one semi um you know very finely open a bit wider very wide and oh and ooh an o and an f okay that biting lip which which we have at the bottom over here so that's all you really need and then from there the software is going to analyze the sound and apply the the right drawings to your to your animation that's simple as that so we're going to go and select the drawing um the um select the sound file we can right click onto it and go into the properties of that of that of that layer so we can go into the layer properties like that there we go and now we've got the sound over here which we are going to analyze from here right so actually what i'm going to do is i'm going to use let me use the other over here that i want to show you so i want to use this one and it's called layer property tab here it is and i'm going to firstly detect the phonemes in the sound it doesn't work with it works with um what we call phonemes which are sounds in the waveform so it's completely language independent okay it's not you can work it in french in spanish in mandarin in turkish any language whatsoever so you detect the phonemes and then you're going to need to map it because at the moment it is here it's going to work here so if i place it you can see here it works amazing but not here yet wow okay so it's detected the phonemes but now you're gonna need to tell it to use your drawing okay so i'm gonna use my mouth over here so uh oops sorry i'm gonna go back there let's just select the mouth where is it here we go that one and then i need to use my drawings but mine are named exactly the same as what it's expecting so a b c d f g and x for nothing that's it it's done as simple as that so now we can play it wow this is amazing wow this is totally rad wow so um it's it's that simple look it is about 85 accurate but if you want to change it that's fine you can scrub and then go change so for example here it's supposed to go wow uh wow at the end so that's it that's fine we're going to stop where we want to change we go here we go to the drawing substitution window and maybe you should use this mouth instead at this point and maybe a bit of a o there and then it goes to a flat neutral one again that's it maybe we try that let's see wow that's it this is amazing so as you can see to do lip syncing is super easy to do cutout animation it's super easy um and and super powerful the the thing with the lip syncing is so cool is that now you can change language right you can go and uh bring in a um a french dub an english dub or a spanish dub and you can just just re-sync the animation all the other animations are still fine if he's walking while he's talking if he's jumping if he's doing anything that's still fine because the mouths are rigged so that they follow whatever parent it's rigged to and attached to and so wherever you change that it will follow the animation now um i want to show you very quickly how easy it is to animate with a cut out puppet so i'm going to bring in a master for the punk okay here he is and this master actually at the moment is not moving okay it's just static now this could have been done let's say somewhere in um in the uk okay or in ireland or anywhere in the world and then i'm using it here i'm dragging dragging and in fact it was in fact this was done in wales by one of our one of our experts in rigging okay and he sends it to me as a tpl and i just drag and drop it into my scene and here it is okay and then we have we can also save an animation into the into the um library a piece of animation in this case what we're gonna do is from frame 10 we're gonna we want him to walk but i i don't want to redo the walk we already have a walk cycle okay so i'm just going to bring the walk cycle straight into the scene that was done by someone else or myself another at another day i don't have the time so i can drag it directly onto the timeline right here from frame 10 and watch what's going to happen in the scene automatically it will take the position of the walk and it's going to start walking of course it's working on the spot at the moment because that's how the animation is done so no problem we are going to now cycle this so i'm going to select it like that i'm going to copy that and i'm going to paste it over here and go to the end and maybe paste it a second time okay and that's it and then i'm just going to stop the playback over here and go back so now my animation is has been looped until the end cool perfect but now we need to make him move so now go to the node view now the node view is probably something that you guys are going to look at and think oh my word this is complex and scary well at first it may seem that way but i guarantee you once you use the node view you're never going to want to go back the node view is a non-linear nodal system that allows you to um anything any element that you have in your scene is represented in a node for example all the parts of this particular character look like this right now so it's a um a way to organize and to rig your characters visually not just but that's one way of explaining it if you think this is complex and you think it's better to rig a character in the timeline then yeah maybe i can show you what this character looks like in the timeline and then you can tell me you know what you really think about that but actually right now you know my character would in parts look a little bit like this over here so there's a lot to it and i can promise you to rig inside of the the timeline is no joke so and this is also much better for composite okay so anything that we have in the scene can have what we call a peg onto it and the peg is what is going to have the animation information okay so very simple that's what we use to animate the camera we're going to do the same for not anything inside the character which is already animated we're going to do the same for a peg which i've added at the top which is going to be just for him moving from whisper's position now to off the screen on the right hand side that's all so i'm going to select make sure i select that i'm going to add a keyframe right there and then i'm going to move to the end of the scene that i want here and then i'm going to move him i'm actually going to put the motion path on so that you can see it i'm going to move him to outside of this of the scene right there just out of the camera view shot like that if i want to see where he is i just want to do that and i can see him okay and that's it he's right there and that should work perfectly and now the animation is on i just the motion keyframing is on so i just need to play it and he's walking you see so it's really that easy so at the beginning is looking at us uh facing us right and then there's quite a big jump from there to there you would probably then go in and do you know some transitions there you would animate maybe a bit of participation a bit of follow-through you know the 12 principles well you still follow that right so you're just going to be using all of that and then he goes into his walk and walks off the screen nonchalantly okay so and you can now do this all over so if you have a run cycle save it as a template bring it into the scene when you want to if you have a jump cycle save it in bring it in and that way you're saving a ton of time but also you're going to be able to focus on quality as opposed to quantity okay so you make sure that you bring all of these things as you go along cool so that's the basic uh you know basic animation using cutout now i'm going to bring in something else altogether so i'm going to bring in the just take the camera out as well and i'm going to bring in a slightly more complex type of rig okay i'm gonna bring in the shark and the shark is a lot more complex because it's got um a 360 degree turn to it now for if you um if you know or you don't know in 2d animation you can't just take the character and turn it around you would have to if you want the character to turn on itself you're going to need to create a the different views so for example a three-quarter front a side view you're gonna need to create a three-quarter back and a back view and then if you're lucky enough that the characters is um symmetrical you would just flip it on the other side and create the other side or you you a bit crazy like us and you go you know almost frame by frame creating all the different angles for the full 360 turn around now let me reassure you that creating these turnarounds or these terms is not as cumbersome as it may look it's a lot of work but you obviously don't have need to redraw everything okay remember we have obviously copy and paste magic right so you can copy and paste the elements you can move them you know move position let's say the eyes and the pupils have moved to the side but they also become a bit more oval as you can see like that that can be done by deforming remember we have deformation so you can put an envelope deformer around it and deform it or it's a vector anyway so you can move the vector if they're not vector you can use deformation so there's a lot of methodology methods that will allow you to create these but it's still a lot of work because you have to create all of these if you want your character to move this way so what happens if you have all of these different things and you want to animate this shark the poor animators will take their you know pull their hair out that's also why i don't have any air so as you can see there the shark is very complex to move around what you can do is you can use in harmony you can use what we call the master controllers okay so the master controllers will allow you to assign a position of of a set of drawings along a either a grid or a slider so also what you can do is we can put reference reference frames for the animators to show them what the controllers do so for example here you can see the master controller here this one operates the torso tilt okay whatever that is and the one one is the turn around one is the blinks the other one is the mouth cool now what we've done is we've associated uh all of the movements that pretend to the turnaround onto a slider so that the animators that don't need to go can you imagine they'll have to go you know take the foot move it the leg move it the torso move it you know or at least expose the different exposures in here all you have to do is take the slider and slide it wait a minute is this 3d no guys come on this is still 2d animation see it's still flat 2d right but you can use the slider and because all of these were created remember we've added them we created them well not now not during the demo but many hours before and now but we've associated to the slider so now the animator all the animate needs to do is to move the slider into position and for the tilt well let's see what the tilt does it's on a grid and now it's tilting all of the elements that we have associated so multiple elements the waste the head the eyes everything all of that has been associated now we want to move his uh his eyes and blink we can do that as well and of course all of this is very smooth so if you want to create an animation a keyframe here another keyframe 10 frames later another keyframe is three frames later and put motion keyframing it will be very smooth so that is the power of motion of master controllers and i can promise you it really really pushes the envelope quite far if you want an example a perfect example two i'll give you two examples of um really really well done master controllers one is a a show on the disney channel called uh lion guard right it's the little um it's the kiddies of the of the lion king movie um and that is actually done with master controls it looks traditional it's so good and then a more recent one is america the motion picture on netflix and that was also done with master controllers especially for the face where the the faces are all rigged and and using master controllers so it's really used quite extensively don't worry it is something that you can learn and you can you can learn to to use it by yourselves okay now we're nearing the end i'm actually gonna run slightly over but i'm gonna talk to you briefly about compositing okay because harmony doesn't just allow you to do um to do animation but also to do compositing so i'm just gonna change the scene here i'm gonna i'm just gonna reopen the scene so it's nice and clean and then i'm going to bring in a a compositing scene so you've probably noticed for those of you who are very observant that we have a node library down at the bottom here and probably wondering what that is now the node library is where all of the different elements that make up a scene uh are housed okay so for example here if i show you a bit more we have everything from the so all the filters are here so all the blurs and the color fades and the glows and the gamma correction and the grains and the shadows and the shine effect which is a new one all of those are here okay we even have particle systems leaves snow rain fire and the elements that make up these particle systems because these are just a presets for you to play around with but we also have the velocity ones we've got the size of the uh emitters we've got the baking capability the gravity pull and so on so all of that can be used to create your own preset of particle systems okay and of course everything that is um that pretends to uh you know sort of deformation and all of that all of that okay here are all the deformation types of of nodes for example so this is where you're going to pull all of your effects from as an example so here we've got a scene with this mad scientist and i'm going to use the um the node view extensively here because it's much easier to look around for compositing so one of the first type of effects that you do in 2d animation are the shadows and the tone and highlights okay shadows are very easy to do in in harmony the first one we're going to look at is a drop shadow you guys probably know this um in terms of dropping the shadow on the floor so when i press the render button like this oh wait a minute uh what have i done here i've actually selected everything which i don't want to do just want to select the shadow first and you can see here the drop shadow on the floor because what we've done is we've actually taken a what we call a quad map to bring it down onto the floor so if i show you what the quad map looks like that's all it is right so i can just select all the corners and i can skew that on the floor like that let me just go back to the opengl mode like this and as you can see you know i can move wherever i want so it's another instance of the of the character which means that wherever that character moves it the shadow will also move so you don't have to paint the shadow frame by frame forget that that's you know too old-school here all you can do is just add a new cable onto it and then add the shadow itself the shadow node and the shadow node if i put on the render once again like that the shadow note gives it this that beautiful shadow effect and so i can maybe change the intensity to 1.5 and it's darker there i can change this to 50 to make it more blurry like that i can change the color all of that can also be changed in time so i can animate all these functions here if i want to okay so shadow is one of the first things that we have then we also have this amazing thing called light shading because this was actually developed during the movie for the movie klaus the netflix movie class and where you see the 2d animation yeah the 2d animation characters like almost they're coming out of the screen a little bit like this one here and so um the light shading effect allows you to do just that to add more of tone and highlights onto the characters and you can even if you want to add a light position a light source to be able to move wherever maybe the shadows are going to go around the room so if your light source is moving you're um you can move the light source position and animate that in time if you want to and again this is completely wherever the animation moves the tone and highlights will move you don't have to do that frame by frame because it's again an instance of another instance of the same character that's that the effect is on and of course we've got a whole bunch of other things such as for example um glows so we've got a glow on the lamps there on the back on the lens there as well we've got some color curves on these guys which change color randomly you know the animated to change color randomly there as you can see uh one frame to another it changes colors and so on and so forth we've got really quite a lot of compositing tools there so you can go crazy you can really composite directly inside of harmony the thing here is that because of the library system you can do some compositing you can have a compositing group and then you know do the compositing while your teammates are animating so if you're late for this school project or you're late for your own production you can sub device divide and conquer your some of your guys will do the uh compositing while your others will be doing the um the animation and when it's done just bring this element here you see this you see this group here which is a light shading i can just deactivate that and it's not there it's not affecting my animation my animation is still working it's still fine and all i need to do is just bring that later so i can completely deselect it like that and this can be saved into the library as a group and then brought into the scene connected properly and activated and then it will work as long as you have the master rig for the for the um the mad scientist you can then create whatever effect that you want on him but it's a drop shadow or the light shading and and so on and so forth okay so again very very powerful there last thing i want to show you is the 2d 3d integration because as i mentioned at the beginning harmony allows you to bring in 3d elements as well so you can bring in for the tech heads out there you can bring in fbx files that you've created in maya in blender in 3ds max whatever and you can also bring in objs or alembic files okay so this scene here seems to be very familiar it's pretty much the same as what we had before right except that it's not because we actually have a 3d environment there and when i press play this is what happens it goes through a 3d scene okay so if i show you that you'll see that in the perspective view you see the flat background and you see the full 3d object in there and that's really really practical because you can go in there and you can virtually you know you can animate and move any object that you want so you can go in there and and you know browse around your entire scene if you want to and you know move things so it's fully 3d remember um in there so you have the ability to select and now you have your 2d you have your 2d as well which will then be able to maybe face the camera so wherever the camera is this 2d cam this 2d camera character will be facing the camera and if you have subdivided your um your objects inside of your 3d scene so if you brought in subdivided fbx files for example you can select these separate elements and you can animate them in here okay so you can animate the robot arm for the mad scientists lab if you want to or the cart or anything any of these objects that are subdivided so you can do the animation of the 2d and the 3d animation in the same environment especially and you would use this mainly and probably only if you are doing um some interaction between 2d and 3d okay so let's say for example in this case where he's in the lab and it's a lot easier or more cinematic to do a 3d lab like this and you have robots moving and you can do the animation or at least part of the animation where they need to interact you do it in harmony and the rest you do it somewhere else so that's really you know what this uh this integration is about and that brings me to uh brings our you know demonstration and session to an end i hope that was uh useful

Channel: Escape Studios

Views: 296

Keywords: Escape Studios, Escape, studios, VFX, Visual Effects, CGI, Maya, Autodesk, Nuke, Foundry, I want to learn, tutorial, modelling, rendering, dynamics, texturing, animation, renderman, compositing, ncloth, motion graphics, design

Id: jLPDI3ZHi4Y

Length: 74min 37sec (4477 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 23 2021